We have 160 total acres, and on our ranch
we raise grass-fed bison. We have about 70 animals right now, including the
calves. Our calves are about 5 or 6 months old. And our oldest animal was
about seven. That's our breeding bull. And the rest of them are between four and
seven years old. We have two breeding bulls and about 30 cows. We've been in
the bison business for about eight years now. We
love it. There's something majestic about them. They're very interesting. They're a
very intelligent animal. They're very inquisitive and of course they're very
dangerous. They're a wild animal and they'll always
be a wild animal. So they're somewhat unpredictable. So we have to be on guard
when you're near them, especially if you're on the same side of the fence as
them, which you want to limit as much as possible. They play with their heads and
they fight with their head. So if they get too close to you, and you get in
their way, they'll just take their horns and shove you aside. Well the problem is
that if it's another animal with a heavy coat on it, that probably doesn't bother
them. But if you're a human being, you don't want to get speared or gored by
them. I have not had a problem, but I've been very careful. I've been very close.
I've had some that have come at me when I've been on the other side of some
sucker rod fence, but only one or two. Most of them are not what I consider to
be very dangerous, although again, they're a wild animal and you can't trust him at
all. My wife and I actually retired out to the farm from our jobs in the Twin
Cities area, and we decided we'd have 10 or 15 animals. And we thought, well let's
try bison. We've always been enamored with them, and that was our original plan.
And then our sons got involved in the business. And they wanted to raise more,
and our herd continued to grow until we got to our current 70. We sell all the
female calves in the fall, so we don't have to switch bulls.
And we'll sell some of the one and two year old bulls in the fall. Also, we
used rotational grazing, so with 14 paddocks, we'll bring the animals in for
anywhere from 2 days to maybe 3 or 4, depending on how fast the grass is growing. And then when the grass gets down - ideally no lower than 6 inches,
sometimes 4 inches, will move them out of that paddock into another paddock that
has taller grass 15, 18 inches. And then when they get that down to perhaps
6 inches, we'll move them into another paddock. And we keep rotating them and by
the time they finish the 14th paddock, we bring them back to the first paddock. And
especially earlier in the summer, that grass has grown up again to where it's
perhaps a foot foot and a half. And then will graze that down to again 4 to 6
inches. And then keep moving them around. That way when we get into the fall of
the year, that we're in right now, this season it gets more difficult, and we
allow them to eat the grass down a little lower. And then when the grass
just isn't palatable anymore, or gets too low. Then we start feeding them hay that
we've put up over the summer months. What are the challenges that you have moving
your animals? Well actually it's not a real big challenge because we're set up
to be able to do it. We have gates that we open from one paddock into another.
And when they're ready to move, and they see the green grass on the other side of
the new gate, they're ready to move. I just open that gate and they run right
through to get to a better pasture. Each of our watering stations has a gate
going into the different paddocks. So the gate over there is going into this paddock.
The gate over there is going into that paddock.
That's our gate going into that paddock. And then this gate is going into this
paddock. So when we want to move them from one paddock to another, we just open
the gate into the paddock we want them to go into, and they'll run through. And then
we close the gate to the paddock that they came from. Four paddocks per water
station, and we have five water stations in all. We use the water tanks that are
heavy-duty old heavy equipment tires that are cemented out in the middle of
the bottom. This one holds 450 gallons and it's heavy. They can't move it they
can scratch their horns on it. They can do whatever they want with it. It stays
right there. The challenge is actually, are probably more involved with setting
up the operation, and that is making sure you have good fencing, and it's high
enough. Your top wire should be close to six feet because they can jump five feet,
believe it or not. And we use high tensile electric with 15 joules of power.
So that was our biggest labor intensive project we had, when we were putting up
all of the fencing. Other than that they're really not that big of a problem
in moving. Usually when you wind up going over to the gate they'll show up at the
gate waiting to go to find the greener grass on the other side of a fence. So do
you like your fence setup? Yes I do. It's worked out real well for us. Do you think
you'd do anything different if you could plan it over again? Actually I
think I'd go with exactly what we have. We've had some people that use the
fiberglass on the exterior fencing and I just feel more comfortable with the T-posts and the wooden posts. We use fiberglass posting for the interior
fencing. And we have four wires on those. And if they try to jump those, at least
they're in another paddock. NRCS was very involved in our project. We initially
planned on setting a pasture for about 30 acres with our 10, 15 animals that we thought we'd start with. And went into the NRCS office to see if I
needed a feedlot permit. I didn't know anything about this. We were city people.
They asked if I'd ever heard of the EQIP program and I said I had not. And
they said well, if you have a few minutes to sit down, we'll tell you all about it.
And then they told us about it. And we had 80 acres in CRP. They brought in a
grazing specialist. He talked about perhaps taking the other 80 acres of CRP,
which was ready to run out, and put that into pasture. And that kind of coincided
with our son's plans to get into the bison business. So we open up another,
actually about 68 acres of pastures that we have, but broken down into eight
different paddocks. NRCS provided first of all, the planning for our paddocks. And
then they provided some of the funding for the fencing, some of the funding for
drilling a well at the other 80 acres that we put up, and just a lot of
technical assistance. If we had any questions at all, we could call the NRCS
office in Willmar, and questions were answered. If we had grazing questions on
how to graze and what to plant for grass and so forth, their grazing
specialist was always ready and available to help us with that, answered
affections we had. We worked with Lance Smith, who has been a tremendous help for
us. We put 40 acres in that had been rented out to an organic farmer, and
we're also organic. So when we planted grass he had a recommendation for eight
different grass seeds we could put in. So we wound up having a real nice mixture
of different grasses, and some of them mature a little bit later than others.
And the animals really liked the diversity. We're also told that in this other 80
acres that had been in CRP for about 35 years, my father-in-law had, I wanted to
just plant, intercede, different grasses in there because it was primarily brome grass in there that was planted many years ago. And Lance said: When you get
animals out here and that hoof action and just stirring up the dirt and
everything, you'll have seeds that have been dormant for 30 to 35 years come
back. Now I was a little skeptical because I mentioned that I was a city kid so I
thought well, he knows what he's doing. And we had animals out there for the first
year and after not even a full year we had grass seeds coming up. That was
unbelievable what happened to that soil and the seeds that were dormant for
that long. But Lance was right .It was just tremendous. Now the diversity that
we have in the grass out there is really unbelievable. Our animals only
eat grass or grass hay in the winter time. We're certified grass-fed for the
USDA. We have haylage in the wrapped white plastic. So we wind up taking the hay and
bailing it when it's wet and wrapping it, so it's basically sealed tightly, and we
feed that in the wintertime. It works out real well for us. We have 30 acres of
cover crops over there that we graze in the spring, for about ten to twelve
days. And then the renters will put a regular crop out there in the summer,
and when they're done harvesting, they'll plant another cover crop for the fall.
And then we run the animals out, probably late October, first part of
November, for about ten or twelve days to eat off the thirty acres of their cover
crop. And some of the cover crop comes up again in the spring, and then we'll wind
up pasturing that tool. There are six different seeds of the cover crops.
There's oats. There's mustard. There's sorghum, Sudangrass.
The animals help the land where recover crops are because, in fact, that's where
organic renters wanted they wanted us to run the animals out there so it would
till up the soil and fertilize it for them. So that when spring came around, since
they're organic, they don't fertilize. They wanted to use our animals for that
purpose. And then it winds up tilling the the soil and then fertilizing it at the
same time. Bison are a little better for the soil because they have a broken, or a
split, hoof. And the split hoof actually does more for the soil. It'll split the
soil. make a little deeper a pocket in the soil. As opposed to, for example, a
horse that just has like a horseshoe concave indentation in the soil. Do you have any advice for anyone who want to get into bison? Yeah, I
think the primary advice I would have is that if you don't absolutely love the
animal, don't get into the business. If you're just entering the
business in order to try to make money, or to turn a profit, and think you're
going to get rich, that's probably, and don't love the animal, it's probably not
going to work out well for you. I think every bison rancher I've ever
talked to has said, if you don't love the animals don't buy them. So I would agree
with that. My wife loves chickens. We have chickens. I don't know how many different
breeds, 10, 12 different breeds different colors. And they're raised organically
also. And they're kind of her little pets. The bison are my little pets. And we get
organic eggs out of them and we get boilers in the spring. We keep these for egg layers. We give eggs away to family and friends. This farm actually has been organic for
probably 20 years or more, thirty years. So when we took over from my in-laws, we
kept everything organic. So we don't use any fertilizer. We don't use any
pesticides, herbicides, of any sort. We grow everything naturally. And we're not
certified organic, but we could get certified, if we wanted to. But we decided
that the cost involved really wasn't worth it. And with bison, if your grass-
fed bison, you're almost considered organic anyway, because they're not
getting anything other than what they get from the soil. We wanted to raise
them naturally, the way God put them on this earth. And they've done very well
with just the grass, as long as we make sure they get good grass and good
hay at all times. It's a choice we've made because we don't want pesticides
in anything that we eat. We sell bison, some to be slaughtered, some buy the
piece, some by the quarter, some at auctions. We want someone to get animals that we
know doesn't have anything chemical in them or no GMO in them. And we just feel
that if we're going to be selling something for other people to consume,
we'd like them to eat something, what I consider to be good clean fresh and
natural. We get the a different bison from ranchers from throughout the
country. Our initial herd started primarily from
Indiana. We gotten them from South Dakota,
Minnesota, Wisconsin. The best thing my wife and I like raising bison is that
they're just an amazing creature.
